


And Afterwards

by Sylvestris



Category: Better Call Saul (TV), Breaking Bad
Genre: F/M, Gen, Nebraska, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-08 10:51:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: The law catches up with Gene. So does Kim.





	And Afterwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cinnabongene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnabongene/gifts).



The day he’s finally arrested is a Tuesday. It’s a relief. When the first cop approaches the counter and instead of ordering a coffee or a seasonal pastry asks him “Are you James Morgan McGill?” it’s a relief to say _yes_ , because being Gene Takavic is like being smothered in slow motion. A weight hangs from his shoulders like a lead vest; he’s exhausted all day and then tosses and turns all night; sometimes when he’s lying there staring at his bedroom ceiling his heart speeds up and he can’t tell why. Coming up on fifty (fifty!) he supposes he’s only human and he never did take much care of himself and especially not now, on his feet all day at the restaurant then driving home to suck down Scotch in front of a bright, twitching screen. Putting out fires for his clients tended to burn off a lot of nervous energy and now that he doesn’t have that he’s added a little weight, which only makes the smothering feeling worse.

Anyway, ever since the feds nabbed Jesse Pinkman he’s figured it would happen to him sooner or later. Gene only reads the local news these days but someone left their _USA Today_ on one of the tables and he happened to see it, opened and folded with the kid’s mugshot uppermost, when he was cleaning up. The story said Jesse gave himself up after a “brief standoff” at a cabin in the mountains in Idaho and Gene was surprised he’d made it that far. Alaska, he’d said; poor bastard never had a chance.

He tells himself in the mirror every morning that he should feel lucky; he’s alive, after all; when the DEA caught up with Walter White, he managed to get out of Albuquerque right before the Quentin Tarantino clusterfuck that ensued. In the very beginning, that was enough. It isn’t any more. He climbs obediently into the back of the police car and lets his eyes drift closed.

 

* * *

 

“Oh, did you hear? They caught the lawyer.”

“What lawyer?” Kim asks, and takes a swig of dark, rich coffee. One thing she didn’t miss in New Mexico was the prairie winters, but upon coming back she remembered that a part of her liked the cold: it’s a pleasant shock to her system every morning, it keeps her sharp, although on the morning commute her hands hurt even with gloves. The other day a man tried to sell her a car with a heated steering wheel— sensing her hesitance he affected a _heck, can you believe this, the features they come up with these days?_ attitude about it, but she wasn’t buying. Too flashy for her taste.

“Walter White’s,” says Janine, her paralegal. “Heisenberg’s. Get this: they caught him right here in town selling like pretzels at the mall, I heard. Under a false name. It’s like, why not Cozumel, y’know? Or Acapulco? Who runs away to Omaha?”

A pang of _knowing_ corkscrews deep into Kim’s solar plexus.

“They caught him yesterday?” Kim asks, typing _douglas county arrest records_ into her search bar.

“Think so. Arraignment’s this morning. Hope he’s got deep pockets. I wouldn’t want to be the PD in charge of that one. Of course, I guess if you’re working with the, y’know, the kingpin types, it would tend to pay nicely.”

Line by line, Jimmy’s booking photo loads. He has glasses and a thick mustache and a sad, slumped posture. He looks like he’s aged fifteen years in five.

_Name: TAKAVIC, GENE_  
_DOB: 06/04/1963_  
_Booking Date: 01/10/2012 16:34_  
_Warrant Type: OUT OF STATE; FAIL TO APPEAR COURT; OBSTRUCT/ELUDE/EVADE POLICE_

Kim drinks her coffee, staring at the letters until they blur.

She has a meeting with a farmer being sued for EPA violations at ten. She has a neat pile of case files to her right, an agenda to her left. Her office door is solid wood; when she moved in it was frosted glass, but her clients tend to value privacy, or at least the sensation thereof. Her new name is etched on a brass plate at the entrance of the building. Giselle St. Clair’s degree hangs in a heavy, expensive frame above her desk. Kim Wexler’s degree is locked away in a cabinet drawer.

“Acapulco,” Janine says. “Or Key West. If I ever had to do the whole Witsec thing, that’s where I’d go. Someplace warm.” She sips her coffee and adds, “Of course, now that I’ve told you that, I guess I’d have to go somewhere else.”

In the glove compartment of Kim’s car there is a many-petalled copper cork. She’d tossed it in there after packing up her apartment in Albuquerque and never got around to finding another place for it, or perhaps just figured that if she leaves it in her car, it might one day get stolen, and if that happens, well, it happens.

“I guess you’ll have to stay out of trouble, then,” says Kim, smiling.

 

* * *

 

“The grand jury charges that on or about the twelfth day of March, 2010, at Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Second District of New Mexico, James McGill did knowingly conduct and cause to be conducted a financial transaction affecting interstate commerce…”

What was he even doing in March 2010? Gene can’t remember. He fell asleep in his cell not long after they booked him and didn’t wake up this morning until someone started yelling.

“…knowing that the property represented in said transaction represented the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, that is, the distribution of a controlled substance…”

The clerk has been droning on like this for a while now.

“…all in violation of Title 18, U.S. Code, section 1962, subsection B, which carries a maximum sentence of twenty years. James McGill, how do you plead on this charge, guilty or not guilty?”

“Sorry. Uh, not guilty,” Gene says, after a nudge from the public defender sitting next to him.

“The court accepts and enters the defendant’s plea of not guilty,” the judge says. “Now, Mr. McGill, given the gravity of these charges and the circumstances under which you left New Mexico, I cannot reasonably grant you bail. You will be remanded to the custody of the Sheriff’s Department until such a time as New Mexico is ready to receive you.”

Gene’s stomach drops. Extradition. Of course. Back to the goddamn Land of Entrapment to rub elbows with all the tattooed two-bit crooks who want to know why Saul Goodman couldn’t keep them out of prison. If he’s lucky. A shiv between the ribs if he isn’t.

 

* * *

 

The beleaguered farmer has gone, and now she’s sitting across from the wealthy parents of a teenage boy who allegedly vandalised some Christmas lights in a leafy gated community. Kim never angled for cases like this, notable only for the amount of money the defendants are willing to sink into them, but when her name started getting passed around in golf course clubrooms, the character of her caseload started to change. _The best defense money can buy_ , she was called. And it stuck. If Jimmy had taught her anything, it was that sometimes, no matter how good you were, the world would dangle the thing you wanted just out of your reach until you leapt up and grabbed it.

“He’s junior varsity,” the mother points out. “We just think it’s disproportionate.”

It’s a petty misdemeanor charge, a mere inkblot on the record of a kid who’ll never stop being handed second chances, but she might as well challenge the resolution of the homeowner’s security cameras in court.

“Everyone deserves a defense,” Kim says.

Driving out of downtown to her next meeting, she forces herself to remember Saul Goodman. And to remember that _Saul Goodman_ , the neon-suited id of Albuquerque’s underworld borne into office on a cresting wave of fuck-you, the man who shed crocodile tears over his brother’s death so they’d give him his license back, is the guy who’s been arrested. Not Jimmy McGill, no matter what the docket says.

Not Jimmy McGill.

Someone’s blaring their horn behind her, and Kim realizes that the light’s turned green. She hangs a U-turn before she can talk herself out of it.

 

* * *

 

They can’t ship him off to the county jail until the prisoner transport van arrives, so for now he’s back in the holding cell with all the other unfortunates, but Gene’s already wondering how long he should wait in prison before trying to blag a pen and paper from someone. You don’t want to stick your neck out when everyone knows you’re a newbie, and God knows he doesn’t cut an intimidating figure these days, but he itches to start working on his defense strategy. Maybe a motion challenging the extradition order would be the best place to start. They’d never grant it, sure, but it would buy him some time.

“All yours, Ms. St. Clair,” he hears from outside the cell, and then, louder, “Takavic. Lawyer.”

Gene hears heels click and looks up and it’s Kim.

She looks the same, but harder, more icy. She’s wearing a slate-blue suit over a slick silk blouse that matches her eyes. This close to her he can tell she never quit smoking. Her nails are still short and bare, her hair still swept back.

Gene stares stupidly, feeling shaky, like he’s run out of blood sugar.

“Well, Mr. Takavic?” Kim says, giving nothing away.

Gene gets up and follows her out. The shoulders of her well-tailored jacket make a sharp sweep. The lining swishes as she walks ahead. She doesn’t wait for him.

“Takavic,” Kim says, breaking the silence in the interrogation room so suddenly that he starts. “That’s a new one.”

“Yeah, well. Wasn’t my choice,” he says, surprised to find that his voice works. “How come you’re here? In— in Nebraska?”

“I moved,” Kim says. She has his case file in front of her and she’s scanning it as she talks, which makes him feel oddly naked. “But I am still barred in New Mexico, so. Thought I’d drop in and see if you needed some help.”

“I was gonna represent myself,” he says, and Kim doesn’t even try not to scoff at that.

“Wouldn’t recommend it.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me again,” he says, haltingly, and she looks up and faces him with that clear cool gaze of hers, lips pursed, fingers drumming absently on the tabletop.

“It’s been a while,” Kim allows. _Wounds heal_ , she doesn’t say. Perhaps hers haven’t healed. He realizes, horribly, that she wants to leave the room, that she’s fighting to make herself stay. “But I heard what happened, and… I figured you might want someone in your corner.”

Did he fall through a wormhole? Is it 2004 again? Can she possibly have forgotten how they left things?

“Kim, I…” he starts. “This case, it’s… I mean… did you read the indictment?”

“I did, yes.”

“Look, Kim… I know it looks bad.”

Kim doesn’t even reply to that, flipping through pages in the file instead.

“I see you were denied bail,” she says, after a long, thoughtful pause. “How about we start there?”

 

* * *

 

“Your Honor, I’ve known James McGill for nearly twenty years,” Kim says, two days later, and Jimmy sits bolt upright, not having expected her to open with that. “I can say with confidence that despite the gravity of the charges against him, it would not be in the public interest to deny him bail. James McGill left the state of New Mexico because he was afraid for his life. He’d been threatened and coerced by his clients. He’d been physically assaulted in his own office. And, as a well-known member of the Albuquerque legal community, he knew that as long as he stayed in the city, he would be a target.”

Listening to this, Jimmy feels as if he’s having an out-of-body experience. Kim was never supposed to intersect with this part of his life; it felt much neater to consider his past as a series of closed chapters, but now someone is opening them all and mashing the pages together.

“So what were his options?” Kim continues. “Mr. McGill personally knew one of the ten men killed in New Mexico prisons last year, and he had reason to believe that this massacre had been orchestrated by one of his own clients, Walter White. He knew he’d never be safe in custody. So he did the only thing he could. He ran. To a place where nobody knew him, where he’d be able to keep his head down and start over.”

“Ms. St. Clair, I trust your client does understand that his trial will take place in New Mexico,” the judge says.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“And even so, you’re confident that he doesn’t pose a flight risk.”

 _Stop believing in me_ , Jimmy thinks. _Stop expecting me to be better_. He doesn’t like it when she uses his real name; it feels like the reassuring weight of her hand on his shoulder; it feels too good to be true.

“I am.”

 

* * *

 

“Why aren’t you using your real name?” he ventures. “…I mean, for the sake of… continuity.”

“Because Kim Wexler doesn’t want to be in the Omaha phone book,” Kim says, and punctuates the sentence by grinding out her cigarette on Jimmy’s back porch. The house came with a wirework outdoor table and two chairs. He’s never used them. _Seriously, why Nebraska?_ he wants to ask, but knows better; the answer might well involve Kim not feeling able to live in the same city as him any more, and that’s something he’d rather not make her say out loud.

“Kim, I just…” Jimmy starts. “When I came here, I had no idea that you were… I promise.”

“Okay,” Kim says, rubbing her hands together. “I believe you.”

“It wasn’t my choice either.”

“How do you mean?”

“Can we do this inside?” Jimmy asks. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I got neighbors, and…”

“Sure. Sorry,” Kim says, and doesn’t laugh at him when he double-locks both doors and pulls the living room blinds.

“There’s this guy in Albuquerque,” Jimmy starts, sitting down opposite her. God, he’s talked more these past few days than he has in months; his throat feels dry and strained. “He provides, uh… relocation services. Sort of cash-under-the-table witness protection. New name, new documents… only you don’t get to choose where you go.”

“So, this person… he takes his clients out of the state without telling them where they’re going?” Kim asks, and Jimmy can tell that the wheels are turning in her head.

“Well, not without— I mean, he said something, but by then it was a done deal,” Jimmy says. “Why?”

“I’m just thinking that could play to your advantage if the district of New Mexico wants to add charges for flight to avoid prosecution,” Kim says. “And/or fraudulent use of ID.”

“Ah, geez… you think they’d…? On top of everything?”

“In the current climate, given what happened with Walter White, and the fact that you’re only the third person they’ve managed to actually charge… yeah, I’d say expect them to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” Kim says.

“Thanks for the reassurance.”

“No, I actually think this could help you. The more charges I can get them to dismiss, the weaker their case gets… and once I get into discovery, I’ll know where to start poking holes. Half the charges you were indicted on, I’d be amazed if they had corroborating evidence.”

“Half,” Jimmy mutters. Kim could get half his charges wiped out and he’d still be facing a decade plus in federal prison. “Kim, I don’t wanna sound ungrateful, but…”

 _Call it the fallacy of sunk costs_ , says a different Kim in a different time.

“Fine,” Jimmy says. “Just tell me where to start.”

 

* * *

 

 

“What do you know about Lydia Rodarte-Quayle?” Kim asks, some days later. A fire roars in the hearth. They tried meeting at her office downtown, but the neatly gridded streets were full of people and the thought of strangers with guns and garrottes made a crushing weight settle on his chest, so she’s been coming to his house instead.

“Who?”

Kim holds up a photo of a dark-haired woman with _INTERPOL Red Notice_ printed underneath.

“Never seen her before in my life.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yeah, that’s the truth.”

“Because the word is Jesse Pinkman is willing to testify that she was a major co-conspirator. And right now, nobody knows where she is.”

Jimmy squints at the text underneath the photo. _Lydia Rodarte-Quayle is wanted for her alleged involvement in several crimes committed in Houston, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, between 2009 and 2011_.

“Look, this thing was—” Jimmy spreads his hands: _huge_. “Tendrils. Everywhere. Gus Fring had people in every state in the Southwest. It says she’s from Texas? Well, there was something in Texas… Walt and Jesse went down to— you know what, I’m gonna stop right there.”

“What were they doing in Texas?” Kim presses. “Jimmy, this could help you.”

“The hell it could!” Jimmy says. He has an awful feeling that Kim thinks he’s already told her the worst of everything. “I don’t even know if it was her they were…”

Kim stares at him until he relents.

“A few months before everything blew up, there may have been an… activity… carried out in New Mexico with the assistance of someone based in Texas, and that person could have been your Rodarte whatever-her-name-is, and I may have… facilitated… that activity by providing personnel. Which makes me an accessory before the fact. So."

“And, hypothetically, which statutes would this activity have violated?” Kim asks.

“Try title 18, U.S.C., section 2118… section 659… throw in section 1991 just for kicks…”

“Wow,” Kim says, after digesting that. “You’ve been busy.”

“That wasn’t even the worst of it,” Jimmy says, because he can’t help himself, even though the next part of the story makes him queasy to think about. “Don’t— don’t ask.”

Nothing slips by Kim. She stares at him again, eyebrows raised.

“All you need to know is, uh, the thing that happened, in the desert, it went bad. Badly. It ended badly. But that was not something that I had anything to do with, okay? I wasn’t there.”

“Okay,” Kim says, making notes on her legal pad.

“And hey— she wasn’t there either. So no offense, Kim, but I feel like we’re barrelling down a blind alley here.”

“What I’ve heard points to Lydia Rodarte-Quayle smuggling blue meth to Europe for almost a year, with Walter White as her supplier. And that’s not even counting whatever she was doing with Gus Fring.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“Jimmy, right now, the person who turns state’s evidence against her is gonna be the person who stays out of prison.”

Jimmy stares at the photo, trying to imagine having seen this stranger before.

“Anything you might have overheard,” Kim offers. “Any time Walt or Jesse might have talked about who they were working with.”

“You think if I knew something I wouldn’t be talking?”

“Given what happened to those other guys? The ones who did talk? Yeah, I think it’s a possibility,” Kim says. She shuffles some papers, then softens. “I just want you to understand that— that’s the state of play.”

Jimmy rests his elbows on his knees, watching the firewood spit and crackle in the hearth.

“You got anyone else I can rat out?”

“What about Michael Ehrmantraut?” she tries, after a pause. Jimmy just shakes his head.

“Says here he’s still missing.”

Jimmy snorts. “Yeah. For ‘missing’, read ‘we don’t know which part of the desert they buried him in’.”

 

 

Abruptly, his extradition order comes through. He’s handcuffed to a marshal and put on a plane and when they land the Albuquerque sky is as shrieking blue as ever. This time, he barely sees the inside of a cell before Kim secures bail; the court releases him into her supervision and their temporary quarters in a downtown hotel. Separate rooms. A hardback copy of _Guest Life New Mexico_ gleams incongruously on the desk until Jimmy covers it with a legal pad.

He detects in Kim an anxiousness to make a deal, and not just because she has a practice in Omaha she’s neglecting, and he doesn’t know how to tell her that it won’t happen; there are no deals to be made; they’re going to have to fight this the old-fashioned way.

He tells her almost everything that happened, almost everything he did, and somehow, she doesn’t leave. She just sits there, taking it all in, generating mountains of notes and hauling them away.

It doesn’t come to him until late one night, when Kim has been staring at him waiting for an answer to a question, and his eyes have drifted to the org chart she’s drawn on a few sheets of printer paper, a family tree populated with crosses and question marks. Gus Fring, deceased. Walter White, deceased. Mike Ehrmantraut, missing. Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, missing. The helpless, childish urge to confess wells up in him.

“Jimmy?”

“Can we just— pivot for a moment?”

“Yeah. What’s on your mind?”

Jimmy exhales.

“There’s this stuff called methylamine,” he says, and Kim starts making notes. “It’s a chemical precursor. Very important, very expensive, very hard to get hold of. Now, Gus Fring had the stuff on tap, but after he was killed, Walt and Jesse had to get it somewhere else. Which was going to be a problem, since black-market hookups are rarer than hens’ teeth. All I know is they don’t know where to get it, and then Ehrmantraut tells me he’s found a source, and I figure that’s that. Then a few weeks later, he comes back to me with some very specific requests. He wants me to find someone who can travel out of Albuquerque for a couple of days and operate a backhoe and install some storage tanks underground, and he wants another guy to create a distraction. Am I painting a picture?”

Kim nods. “So where’s the methylamine?”

“It’s on a freight train. Mike’s new hookup is Lydia Rodarte-Quayle, known associate of Gus Fring, who just happened to oversee a national freight network involving, guess what, mass quantities of industrial chemicals.”

“So they… what, they siphoned it out of the train?"

“I’m just connecting the dots here, but yeah. Seems so.” Jimmy pauses. “The thing is… so they go off to I don’t know where to do it, they come back, and then a day later, this… this kid gets reported missing. Drew Sharp. Fourteen years old, lives in McKinley County. He was out riding his bike in the desert and he never came home.”

Jimmy inhales.

“Within a week, maybe, Jesse Pinkman quits. Doesn’t give a reason, just doesn’t want to do it any more. Four, five months later, he turns up at my office looking like the walking dead, and he has these two duffel bags full of cash. Literally, two and a half million dollars per. And he tells me he wants me to get one of them to Mike Ehrmantraut’s little granddaughter… and the other to the parents of Drew Sharp.”

Kim bites her lip and considers. Jimmy doesn’t like the way she isn’t meeting his eyes any more.

“You think Jesse Pinkman killed Drew Sharp?”

“No. Not him. If I had to guess, it was either Walt or Todd Alquist that did it.”

Kim is silent for a long moment.

“You need to take everything you just told me and use it to make a deal.”

“I can’t."

“Jimmy, you’ve just told me you have evidence implicating someone in the felony murder of a child.”

“Circumstantial evidence.”

“Enough to prosecute,” Kim says. She’s looking at him again, full of conviction. “And from what you’ve said, if Pinkman feels responsible…”

“It wasn’t him. I know— I know how felony murder works, but you gotta understand… whatever happened out there, it was eating him up inside. He didn’t kill that kid. I can’t throw him under the bus for it.”

“You know this is our best shot.”

“I know. I just… I’ve done enough damage.”

“Okay,” Kim says. “Okay. And you don’t think Drew Sharp’s parents deserve to know what happened to their son?”

“What they deserve is… it—it’s not my choice to make.”

“I think it is.”

“I’d be putting a twenty-seven-year-old in prison for the rest of his life.”

“He’s facing twenty-five to life as it is.”

Jimmy looks away from her; he knows that if he meets her eyes for a second longer, she’ll convince him.

“I’ve done enough damage.”

 

* * *

 

It’s in a downtown 7-Eleven, of all places, where he finally loses his nerve. Back in his PD days— in the beginning, before Chuck retreated into his house and money started to be a problem— he used to run down here to buy lunch between cases. Not every day, but often enough that he knew the clerks by name. He’d buy a coffee cake or a sandwich and hurry back across the Civic Plaza to the courthouses, enjoying the swing of his briefcase in his hand.

Now when he puts his hand to the glass door there’s a sign there saying THESE PREMISES ARE UNDER VIDEO SURVEILLANCE BY THE ALBUQUERQUE POLICE DEPARTMENT, but otherwise it hasn’t changed. And then, while paying for Kim’s smokes and a copy of the _Journal_ , he looks up and sees that the clerk is— what was his name? Lane? Lonnie? _Lance_. The copy shop kid. He looks closer to forty than thirty now and the mop of ginger hair is starting to thin, but it’s him.

“Uh, $6.57,” says Lance, barely looking at the cash Jimmy hands him. Jimmy doesn’t have much time to ponder the coincidence before his palms start sweating. Nine years, and he meets this guy mere _blocks_ from where they met the first time, as if the city’s gravitational pull sucks in anyone who gets too close and keeps them circulating there, forever.

“Hey, are you that guy—”

“No,” Jimmy says, and pushes his way out of the store. He can’t stay in Albuquerque, not as long as it remains full of people who once knew him, and people who once knew Saul. He runs back to the hotel, tosses Kim’s cigarettes on the bed, and starts packing.

“What’s up?” she asks, then sees what he’s doing. “Jimmy?”

“I want you to put your sweats on, go downstairs, and go to the gym,” Jimmy says, cramming shirts into his bag. “I don’t care what you do there, just stay there for like an hour and a half. Talk to whoever’s there. Find something to complain about. Just make sure people see you. Then—”

“Jimmy.”

“—go to the front desk, say you lost your keycard and you need a new one, that’ll prove that you were there, then come back up here and immediately report me missing.”

He reaches to pull another shirt out of the closet, but Kim grabs his arm.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I just came to my senses.”

“Running away? Yeah, that sounds sensible.”

“I realized where I was,” Jimmy says, slipping past her into the bathroom to grab his things off the counter, “and what I could expect to happen to me from here on out, and I had a moment of insight. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Insight,” says Kim, blocking the doorway before he can get out. “Jimmy, I don’t know what prompted this, but you need to stop. Right now.”

“Kim, I appreciate your help, but—”

“Where are you gonna go?” Kim asks. She’s still not moving, and for an awful moment he sees himself grabbing her and shoving her out of the way. “You don’t have a car. What, are you going to get on the bus? Ride all the way out to that truck stop on I-40 and start hitching? Yeah, that sounds like a plan.”

“Kim, I’m going.”

“Jump on a train? Great, you can get arrested in Santa Fe.”

“I’m going.”

“You can’t.”

“Or what? Or I’ll go to prison? ‘Cause, newsflash: that’s a done deal!”

“Or you’ll live in fear for the rest of your life,” Kim says, so loudly and forcefully that his head hurts.

Jimmy looks at her.

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be looking over your shoulder. You’ll be doubting every person you meet. You’ll be too afraid to get to know anybody in case they find out who you are. And one day, you’ll be too old and too tired to run any more. And that’s when they’ll catch you. And you _will_ go to prison.” Kim sucks in a breath. “And you will die there.”

Jimmy studies her, astonished, and knows she’s right.

They spent his thirtieth birthday together, not long after he came to New Mexico. He hadn’t told anyone, but Kim had seen the date on some paperwork. She brought him a card and took him out for a drink and told him that Albuquerque wasn’t so bad once you got acclimated, but it was June and it was brutally hot and they ended up at a Dairy Queen drinking cherry-vanilla shakes as Kim explained Socratic questioning to him. She was laughing at one of his jokes, a stray dab of ice cream on her cheek, when he realized all at once that he was falling in love with her.

He looks into Kim’s dear lined face and knows they are not young any more.

“Okay,” Jimmy says, and it’s strange: a weight lifts off his shoulders as he says it. “Okay.”

Kim takes the toothbrush out of his hand and places it back on the counter. She rests a hand on his shoulder, staring at the same vague place that he is, and then she spins around and kisses him hard.

 _Oh, God_. Jimmy’s hands float up to Kim’s back and skim over her shoulderblades. She’s as compact and solid as ever: when he stumbles out of the bathroom and sinks down onto the bed she pins him easily. “Kim,” he groans, overwhelmed, and she’s already working at his belt buckle but she leans down to kiss him again. Jimmy scrunches his eyes shut tight.

 _It was always you_ , he wants to say. _You were the only one I ever_ —

“I know,” Kim says, so close that her voice vibrates in his chest, and he realizes he’s crying hot tears into the crook of her shoulder. “I know.”

 

**JANUARY 2019**

 

“She does know we’re calling, right?” Jimmy asks, watching Bill dial. He’s not nervous, but his hands knot together anyway.

“We’ve briefed her,” Bill says. Jimmy first knew him as Agent Hood of the Federal Witness Protection Program, but he’s Bill now. He coached Jimmy on his new life story, helped him with references for his new job, and quizzed him about the place he officially grew up in case anybody ever asked. Bill reminds him a lot of Mike, and enough time has passed that being reminded of Mike is a mournful, warm feeling, not a sharp internal churning. “She knows. Now, one more time: what are we not telling her?”

“Place names from state to street level, what I do for a living, who I work with, what my neighbors are like…” He snaps his fingers. “Oh. Anything political. As far as she’s concerned, I slept through the midterms.”

“Over to you,” Bill says, and hands him the receiver.

“Jimmy,” Kim says. The agents must have told her she was allowed to use his old name, which happens to be his new name too. James Willard Mackay— Bill said for a lot of people staying closer to the old name is easier. But when she says it, God, he’s twenty-nine again and everything is new and green. “It’s good to hear from you.”

“You too,” Jimmy croaks. His eyes are stinging, and Bill kindly pretends to be very interested in the local paper. “How— how are you?”

“Good,” says Kim, radiant. “I’m good. How are you?”

Getting sent to a federal prison in North Carolina threw a wrench into their plans to keep in touch. Kim clearly couldn’t be his lawyer any more. He tried his best at first, using all his phone time to talk to her, but there was always a line of people behind him and never enough time, so the calls got less frequent, and so did the letters. In his more self-pitying moments he thought of himself as a millstone, the dragging weight keeping Kim from her airy blue dreams. In his calmer moments, he understood that he was too far away now to ever do her any damage again.

“I’m good too,” Jimmy says. “They, uh… they set me up pretty nicely. I was worried I wouldn’t know what to do with myself when I got out, but… no, the guys from you-know-where took care of everything.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

What he missed in all those prison phone calls was the chance to simply be in each other’s company. That was the thing about Kim: she never felt the need to fill a silence.

“I wish I could tell you where I am.”

“I know.”

“I can tell you, uh… it’s a beautiful day here.” Jimmy says. “Blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.”

He moves to the front door, steps out onto the porch.

“Close your eyes. Picture it. There’s woodsmoke in the air. Someone’s got a fire going. The birds are pecking away at the birdfeeder…”

“Sounds nice,” Kim says. In his head she leans against a dark wall, a glowing cigarette in her hand.

“There’s traffic. Not a lot. Just sort of in the distance. And from where I’m standing…”

He looks round at Bill, gestures _don’t worry, I’m not gonna give it away_.

“I can see… well, let’s say, more than one other dwelling. But it’s mostly open space. There may or may not be snow on the ground, and… frost on the roof of my car…”

These days he signs his name with a flourishy _James_ and then a linked _WM_. His talisman.


End file.
